What 17 Million Views From One Senate Primary Taught Us About Creator Strategy for the Midterms

On August 4th, Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. The race generated significant creator engagement and became one of the most talked-about races of the summer. In the weeks leading up to the primary, 40 creators from our network alone produced 234 posts across Instagram and TikTok that generated 17.1 million views and an 11.6% engagement rate. We analyzed every post, every metric, and every call to action, and what we found is one of the clearest real-world windows into how creator strategy functions in a live campaign environment.

More Posts Does Not Mean More Reach

The most important (and most counterintuitive) finding in this dataset is that the creator who posted the most content drove the least reach.

One creator produced 98 of the 234 total posts – 42% of all content – and those posts generated just 3.7% of total views. Meanwhile, 5 creators averaging around 9 posts each drove the vast majority of the network's reach. To put that in concrete terms:

• 1 creator generated 3.44 million views from 11 posts

• Another generated 3.13 million from 9 posts

• 1 generated 2.73 million from 9 posts

• 1 generated 2.54 million from 11.

• And another 1 generated 1.58 million from just 2 posts

The top 10% of posts captured 76% of all views. The top 1% – 2 posts out of 234 – captured 20%.

What this means practically is that campaigns should be investing in finding the right creators and the right moments, rather than maximizing posting volume.

Timing Matters More Than Cadence

The biggest single spike in views across the entire sample came on primary night itself, not during the weeks of sustained posting that led up to it. In fact, daily posting volume peaked earlier in the month, but views didn't follow. Reach and posting cadence were clearly operating on different schedules.

The top four posts by views were all "breaking news / big moment" content like primary night results, "is this a movement" commentary, and they drove millions of views without any call to action attached. The lesson here is that the moments that move people are often the moments you can't fully plan for. Having creators ready to react quickly when something big happens – a debate, a primary result, a major news development – is more valuable than having a packed content calendar.

The one exception worth highlighting: Allie O'Brien's "MICHIGAN IT'S UR TIME" GOTV countdown post appeared across multiple platform variants and was the only high-view post in the top 10 to also deliver a top-tier engagement rate of 30.7% on TikTok. Well-timed GOTV content with a clear call to action can drive both reach and engagement at once, which is a combination that's genuinely hard to achieve.

Local vs. National Creators: Different Jobs, Both Necessary

Only 5 of the 40 creators in this sample were Michigan-based, and the contrast between their numbers and the national creators is significant. Michigan creators averaged 14,716 views per post at a 15.2% engagement rate. National creators averaged 129,767 views per post at 11.1%, nearly nine times the reach per post, with slightly lower engagement.

National creators drove roughly 90% of total reach in this sample. But Michigan creators were doing something different and equally valuable: building deeper, more loyal engagement with a local audience that actually lives in the state. Their content resonated more within a smaller community, which is exactly what you want from a local authenticity layer.

The structure that emerges from this data is a two-tier approach: a small bench of high-reach national creators for scale, paired with trusted local voices per state for depth and authenticity. Both tiers matter, and they serve different purposes that are hard to replicate with the other.

The Message Discipline Finding

One of the most remarkable things about this creator network has nothing to do with views or engagement rates. Across 40 independent creators, every post that took a side took the same side – and we found no evidence of central copy distribution. Forty different people, posting independently, with zero counter-narrative.

That kind of alignment comes from genuine mission investment, developed over time. It's the difference between creators who were briefed on what to say and creators who actually believe in what they're saying. For campaigns building creator programs for the midterms, this is worth sitting with: message discipline at scale is a byproduct of real relationships, not tighter briefs.

The Michigan primary was one race, but the patterns it revealed about how reach concentrates, what formats drive what outcomes, and how local and national creators complement each other are patterns we expect to see play out across the midterm landscape.

The campaigns that take these lessons seriously now will be better positioned when the moments that matter most arrive.